ginnyfizz

No, the point is, we are not attempting to force the Imperial system on anyone else, but the EU are attempting to force it on us. No-one is calling the Imperial system freedom, or saying it is better than the metric, we merely desire the freedom to use it when we choose. But there is no give and take here, the EU decrees that we should prosecute greengrocers for selling their fruit and veggies in pounds and ounces. Whatever happened in the past as to standardisation of weights and measures in the UK isn't relevant - surely you cannot argue that just because a long ago law (passed by our own government of the time) made the Imperial system compulsory, that gives the EU - who, last I heard did not govern Britain - the right to stuff their metric system down our throats?

Er, yes, but Britain is a series of islands, hehe! I am familiar with the works of John Donne by the way, studied him at school. There is no question of pride or self assurance going on here. Once more, with feeling...we do not wish to compel those who are happy with metric to use Imperial. When dealing with metricated countries, we respect that and deal in metric. We do not criticize any country that chooses for themselves to be metric. That is called fair-mindedness, not arrogance. And it is why we cannot understand why we, who do not wish to force our system on others, should be forced into using the metric system. There is absolutely no way that can be termed arrogance. And as for cubits...we don't use those any more, believe it or not.

No, not wrong, because we are not insisting on anyone else using the Imperial system. It should be noted that at no time have I said that I am for compelling countries that want to use the metric system, to use the Imperial system. That's a very strange use of the word arrogance which last I heard was defined thus;- Arrogance - Webster's Dictionary Once more, those of us who wish to continue to be allowed to use the Imperial system in our own nations, neither claim it is better than the metric nor do we want to impose it on others. It is merely a case of it being what we are used to using. And when shipping goods to countries that use the metric system, we will use the metric system in terms of pricing, on all the documents, etc, etc. That certainly does not fit any definition of arrogance that I know. What DOES fit the definition of arrogance is being told by the EU "You will use the metric system because we say so, because we use it and it is better." There is very little that is more calculated to raise the hackles of perfide Albion (or, indeed, America) than that.

I just don't get this need to try and compel people to use one or the other system. It's both totalitarian and at the same time, naive. Naive because you just can't standardize everything and put it in neat little boxes, and thinking you can do so will only lead to frustration. And totalitarian, because someone is telling me "Because I say so". Like the man said "Aw, nuts!" I don't see what is wrong with using metric when dealing with friends and customers in continental Europe, and Imperial here in Britain. Live and let live, I say. I rather like being five foot nine rather than 1.74m. And buying my groceries in whatever units I please. I do not see why we need a law to force us one way or the other.

Yes I can certainly identify with the current system of EU labeling of eggs, which is clear enough and helps me in my boycott of eggs from caged hens. Ideally I would like to keep my own chickens so that they couldn't be metricated, but then I'd need a gun to keep off the foxes... But anyway, on topic...seriously, there is no reason we can't run both systems. I used to do a fair amount of dressmaking and I still knit and do embroidery. If, for example, I wish to knit from an elegant French or Italian designer collection, the pattern will be expressed in grammes. So I look for balls of yarn accordingly. A robust traditional British pattern will be expressed in ounces if it is old, maybe in grammes if it is newer. For lace knitting (the Shetland wedding ring shawls for example) you need to look at the yards or metres per ball as well. Thus what I am saying is, this is a (literally) homespun example of how the two systems can work together.

Where in europe people buy eggs by GRAMS? xDI'm in Italy and the traditional packages were a dozen or half-dozen of eggs but now you can find chicken eggs in any pair number up to 12. There, you can check yourself through this online shopping site. Click "visita libera al supermercato" = free supermarket tour. Latte, burro, uova = Milk, butter, eggs. And as far as I know eggs weight (medium/big/small) only matter if you need more or less white, since the yolk weight do not change significantly. Nobody buys eggs by the gramme - yet. There is apparently another loopy rule in the pipeline, not yet law, that proposes we shall all buy our eggs by the gramme. At the moment, we can all buy our eggs in boxes of however many is the norm in our respective countries. But the EU wants to try and standardize everything and make us buy them by the gramme. With a bit of luck, most governments will say "Aw nuts" to this nutty proposal. All my recipes will specify something like "four standard eggs" or "six large eggs". @SilverDNA - as to the question of dried yeast, certainly here it either comes on sachets or small tubs. Usually the former, so you would specify "one packet of..."

The problem being, we are not forcing the rest of Europe to use the Imperial system and are happy to use metric in any kind of international transactions. We merely object to the EU telling us we can't use Imperial and must use metric at home. (I kid you not, two greengrocers became known as the Metric Martyrs due to them being persecuted for selling their fruit and veg by the pound) That's dictatorship. There are enough nutty EU food rules (like OMG no bent bananas) to fill one of my hazelnut, marmalade and chocolate cakes...(take half a pound of finest Belgian chocolate, one pound of marmalade, half a pound of hazelnuts, ground, etc, etc....)

I happily use either system, depending on who and what I am dealing with. WHEN I CHOOSE TO. What I do object to is some bossy britches petty tyrant from the EU ordering me to buy my eggs by the gramme or my anything by the gramme/kilogramme. "Do it because we say so". Huh, or, "Aw, nuts!" as that American general magnificently said. That's the thing about Anglo Americans you see. Rebellious. Won't be dictated to. I cannot have my prize winning rich fruit cake recipe, handed down through the generations and darned delicious with a slice of Wensleydale cheese (as taken in the epicentre of English bloody mindedness, Yorkshire) metricated. It would just be WRONG. A slice of tradition packing at least 1000 calories. I have no idea what that would be in joules and I don't care.

*Sigh* the same chickens as everyone else , various different breeds. The issue objected to is the fact that there is some crazy EU proposal that eggs be sold by the gramme rather than by the egg. So instead of going to buy a dozen or a half dozen eggs, we'll have to buy however many grammes. Which is a pain in the derriere when your recipe calls for "four eggs" or whatever. I do like baking cakes and pastries and making omelettes and I would like to defend the Great British Egg against metric tyranny. (Great British irony in action btw...)

I use either, what ticks me off is when the EU rules result in the prosecution of greengrocers who insist on selling their apples in pounds and ounces because that's what the customers want. And the latest insanity about having to buy eggs by the gramme rather than by the unit, ie egg.

I was under the impression that the US Government were already about to revoke BP's drilling permits, which would damage the American economy even more than it would damage BP since BP are by far the biggest player in the offshore drilling stakes (as well as being a company that is mainly US owned) and if they go belly up, so does the greater part of the show in the Gulf . Smart move, Mr President, and yes I am being sarcastic. I cannot believe some of the stuff I am reading about this. As a proud Briton who, nonetheless, admires the people and the nation of the USA, and who can see the faults both of my own country and of BP for sure, I am disturbed by the determination that people seem to have in this case to condemn BP without trial, and the attendant anti-British xenophobia that is being generated. Led by a President with a personal axe to grind (or so he thinks) against the British and a pressing need to try and divert attention from trouble at home. I have had plenty to say about the death of civil liberties in my own country and the seeming abolition of Habeas Corpus and the presumption of innocence. I little thought that I would see the United States going the same way of kicking into touch that same presumption of innocence. I'm no friend of Abdel Basset el Megrahi, and my idea of what would be the correct thing to do with him involves "Three yards of cord and a sliding board". And if it is true that BP lobbied on behalf of this filthy murderer, it is utterly contemptible. And also utterly irrelevant to the case relating to the oil spill. It neither proves or disproves their bona fides in the oil case. Now my opinions of the European Court Of Human Rights are also unprintable, but were I the lawyer representing the BP board, I'd be advising my clients that the ECHR would overrule any extradition warrant even if the UK Government were to grant it. There will be no trial at all if this pre-judging goes on.

Good grief, I would never find the time to play for 18 hours a day, what with working full time AND being a carer for my elderly parents. Even as a gamer myself, I would find it very hard to understand someone playing that long.

I can understand the view about faces. I am primarily interested in making beautiful faces on my toons. In fact I am on a mission to try and make my vanilla race characters look beautiful by judicious use of good quality face textures and the elimination of the blotchies by using better age maps. Also the head mesh is important (I LOVE Robert's head mesh from the Head and Hair Resource for Elves and for halfies like Bretons). But since I changed my body mod and due to the previous plethora of the tittus ginormicus in Image Share, there was at one time no point in uploading any purty portraits. Now that the nude images have been banished, perhaps there will be more scope for portraits, landscapes, good lighting (whether photoshopped or not.)

And Dark0ne has explained it much better than I have managed (in my inimitable muddled way). Encapsulated what I was TRYING to say. This is why I voted yes, the nude images should go. Because they were getting gratuiitous (that Yay Boobies syndrome again.) I must admit I am no expert with Photoshop ( painted a face texture the other week and had to lie down to recover...) but I do love to see the work of others who do know what they're doing.

Actually I think the arrival on the scene of certain body types is very relevant to the debate. It's not usually the regular HGEC bodies as such that get used for the gratuitous tit shots, though. It's the extreme variants, Bigger Double Melons et al, where the blimps are so big that they are the only things that can fit in the picture that are the problem. I've seen smaller bags on a prize Holstein milker, and I've milked plenty. In those cases, where the boobs are as demanded by the "bigger than a K-Cup please" fanboys, there is NO reason other than the Yay Boobies one for screenshotting them. That's what I call gratuitous. But you can't say you'll have one body mod in and others out, got to ban all nudes just the same. That's the sort of dilemma. I tend not so much to use the word porn so much but to mention the depiction of sexual acts and states of arousal. So things like spread legs, two toons together in a sexual pose, boners and such obviously get kicked into touch. Torture and bondage too, is so debatable that it's best out of the picture. Literally. People can go elsewhere for that.

I don't think anyone is objecting to the banning of torture, rape, paedophilia (as far as I was aware these always were banned). I don't allow either these or depiction of any kind of sexual acts on my site, either, and have wielded the ban hammer myself on transgressors. Insta ban territory as far as I am concerned. I think it is the "No nudity at all" that folk are finding hard to understand. And I have said that I understand and support the decision of the site owner here, precisely because I can see that with a family of sites as huge as this, it is much harder to draw the line between what is and isn't tasteful nudity, and to police the images and their consequences, than it is on a small site like mine. Don't get me started on image hosts.... :mad: despite my premium Photobucket account, they regularly "bucket" fully clothed images of my toons. Especially if they are any race with a demon tail or any toon with red hair...nothing I can do though, never any explanation why a fully clothed toon is too rude, but as they have millions of images being uploaded every hour, I guess they have to shoot first and ask questions later.

I can see both sides of this, makes me feel pretty uncomfortable because I have experienced some of the dilemma that Dark0ne has faced, on my own MUCH smaller site. At the end of the day though, we have to respect what Dark0ne has decided and stand by his decision, he owns the joint and what he says goes. On the one hand, I find any puritanism associated with the naked human body disturbing. I do not mean that I want to see overt, demeaning porn shoved in my face everywhere I go. But at the end of the day, nudity is natural, we all have a naked body, and we need to take away some of the sexualization of said body, Vindekarr put it a lot better than I have. I'd hate for us to go back to the days where convent schoolgirls (hehe luckily this was before the time when I attended such an establishment) were forced to bathe in long flannel smocks so they couldn't see their own or anyone else's body. I also find the nudity = bad but violence = fine thing disturbing, admittedly this is more of a problem in the US than in the UK and Europe. On the other hand, you only have to look at what has happened with some of the more extreme variants of certain female body mods to see a valid reason for banishing the nude images. Lord knows I am no prude, after all the site I own once had a very active thread called the Temple Of The Holy Boobies which at first was meant to rooster a snook at the Puritans (see above.) But then the variants of the HGEC body got more and more extreme, the boobs like barrage balloons, and I HATE to see them, I just cannot imagine what some of the lovers of these extremities would do if faced with a REAL female body. Pictures of some of these I find degrading. In the end, I switched to Robert's Female for Oblivion. So I can certainly see Dark0ne's point and it is why I support his decision.

Solar is no good for a car, but it is wrong to assume that there needs to be fierce unbroken bright sunshine for it to work for buildings. It merely has to be daylight. I have seen a large medieval church in Sleaford, Lincolnshire, England successfully use solar power. They can heat and light this beautiful and huge building, AND sell power back to the National Grid, even in winter. England is not noted for its unbroken sunshine, and yet solar energy has been seen to work. A new housing estate has been built near me and the residents are finding their solar panels more than adequate (even in the winter.)

"There are more things in heaven and on earth, Horatio..." as the bard said. Perhaps it's the Celtic mystic in me, but I keep an open mind and there can't always be a rational explanation for ghostly phenomena. I have spoken to far too many priests who are officially sanctioned exorcists, from different denominations, to remain a complete sceptic. (That is not turning this into a religious debate, by the way. I just speak of people who have a professional interest in the paranormal, you could mention mediums and secular paranormal consultants too.) There are places where I have been where, for some reason, I have felt overwhelming feelings of foreboding, evil and sometimes outright terror. Other places, a feeling of great holiness and peace. I defy anyone to climb Glastonbury Tor in the twilight, preferably not fortified by some of the interesting substances found at the rock festival, and not feel the weirdness. But then it IS supposed to be the entrance to Annwfn (the Celtic Otherworld) and the palace of Gwynn ap Nudd. Perhaps past events leave a psychic echo of some kind? So in places where great evil or sadness has taken place, traces of it remain. Maybe that is why so many ghostly apparitions are said to happen at murder scenes from centuries gone by, or at crossroads where suicides were traditionally buried (at least in the UK). Or why, when I lived on Dartmoor, there was a particular crossroads where even the most placid of my horses would fly into a panic and attempt to dump me in the road and run away? Turned out that the particular crossroads was the site of the village gallows. I never did get to meet the Wisht Hounds or the Hairy Hands though, Dartmoor's most notable apparitions.

We were all making the same point at work. You see all the other teams belting out their national anthems, just look at how the German team were singing away and then the bloomin' England shower didn't even know the words to God Save The Queen.

Many of us think that the pampered fools in the England team should be made to swim home.

Thanks for that exposition, Vindekarr. I have never seen solar power as viable in the transport sector, and what you say reinforces that. I still believe that we should develop new technologies in case of fossil fuels running out, but I do not think we should seek to obliterate the oil, gas and coal industries, and should still press ahead with exploration for these fossil fuels.

I for my part certainly do not think England were the better team, merely that if they'd gone 2-2 as they should have, England would have had more edge. But the general consensus of the TV pundits is that they were a bunch of jessies, basically, and deserved to lose. My Dad's remarks were rather less repeatable...

Why they can't have the video ref fourth official like in rugby union I don't know...well I do actually, Herr Blatter says It's too expensive....ROFL. I am sure we will be having a whip round at work tomorrow for a Specsavers voucher for the referee, anyway...